Complaints Procedure - Lewis & Dick Solicitors

We are committed to providing a high-quality legal service to all our clients. When something goes wrong we need you to tell us about it. This will help us to improve our standards.

If you have a complaint, please contact the person nominated to deal with such matters named in the Client Care Letter sent to you at the outset of your matter. Failing that, please contact our Chief Executive, Philip Jones based at our Crawley Office 18 Brighton Road, Crawley, West Sussex RH10 6AA (Tel: 01293 526031). You will need to write him and he will liaise with the person in charge of the department involved in your complaint.

What will happen next?

(i) We will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint and asking you to confirm or explain the details set out. We will also let you know the name of the person who will be dealing with your complaint. You can expect to receive our letter within 7 working days of us receiving your complaint.

(ii) We will record your complaint in our central register and open a file for your complaint. We will do this within a 5 working days of receiving your complaint.

(iii) We will then start to investigate your complaint. This may involve one or more of the following steps :We may ask the member of staff who acted for you to comment on your complaint within 5 days.We may examine their reply and the information in your complaint file. We may then ask them for more information. This will take up to 3 days from receiving their reply.

(iv) We may invite you to meet our Chief Executive, or another Director to discuss and hopefully resolve your complaint. We will normally do this within 21 days of receiving your complaint.Alternatively, we may send you a detailed reply to your complaint. We will normally do this within 21 days of receiving your complaint.

(vi) At this stage, if you are still not satisfied you can write to us again. We will then arrange for someone in the Firm who has not been involved in your complaint to review it. They will do this within 10 working days.At this time we will write to you confirming our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons.If you are not satisfied with our handling of your complaint and 8 weeks has passed since your complaint you may refer the matter to the Legal Ombudsman at:

A complaint would have to be raised with the Legal Ombudsman within 6 months of your last contact with us.

The Legal Ombudsman will normally only consider a complaint about an act which occurred less than 6 years ago or where you should have reasonably known there was cause for complaint, no less than 3 years ago.

Alternative complaints bodies such as Promediate http://www.promediate.co.uk/ exist which are competent to deal with complaints about legal services should both you and our firm wish to use such a scheme. If we have to change any of the time-scales above, we will let you know and explain why.

Lewis & Dick provide Property Conveyancing from our Crawley, Ewell and Haslemere offices, along with Powers of Attorney and Wills and Probate. As qualified Solicitors in Crawley and Ewell, we have a traditional, personal approach to each client, in the areas of Conveyancing, Mortgages, Leases, Litigation, Family Law or Business legal advice. Whatever legal service you require, we will provide a friendly cost effective solution..